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Open access making a real difference

A new website has been launched to provide real examples of the way that open access can transform scholarship. One of the stories describes the overwhelming response for St Andrews researchers following the decision to publish in an open access journal. The topic of the paper caught the public imagination when described as development of an 'invisibility cloak' in the University press release.

"As a result of the coverage, the paper was downloaded more than 50,000 times in the space of just a few months, and it reached an extremely wide and diverse audience for a technical scientific paper."

A new EU Horizon 2020 project has been announced, entitled High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure, or HIRMEOS for short. We've written on this blog numerous times about open access books, see previous posts here and here, and from what is known about this project it certainly could be a very important next step in advancing open access long-form publishing in the Humanities and Social sciences.

The Swiss National Science Foundation and swissuniversities have come together to agree a national strategy aiming for all publications financed with Swiss public money to be accessible free of charge by 2024.

The joint principles and strategy are outlined in a document published on 31 Jan 2017, which states "all stakeholders, politicians, higher education institutions (and their libraries) and funders have to join forces to pursue common goals" - including aligning existing OA policies and supporting new OA publishing models.